From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   The Taíno were a historic indigenous people of the Caribbean, whose culture   
   has been continued today by Taíno descendant communities and Taíno   
   revivalist communities. At the time of European contact in the late 15th   
   century, they were the principal    
   inhabitants of most of what is now Cuba, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Haiti,   
   Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, and the northern Lesser Antilles. The Lucayan branch   
   of the Taíno were the first New World peoples encountered by Christopher   
   Columbus, in the Bahama    
   Archipelago on October 12, 1492. The Taíno spoke a dialect of the Arawakan   
   language group. They lived in agricultural societies ruled by caciques with   
   fixed settlements and a matrilineal system of kinship and inheritance. Taíno   
   religion centered on the    
   worship of zemis.   
      
   Some anthropologists and historians have argued that the Taíno were   
   exterminated centuries ago, or they gradually went extinct by blending into a   
   shared identity with African and Spanish cultures. However, many people today   
   identify as Taíno or claim    
   Taíno descent, most notably in subsections of the Puerto Rican, Cuban, and   
   Dominican nationalities. Many Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Dominicans have   
   Taíno mitochondrial DNA, showing that they are descendants through the direct   
   female line. While some    
   communities claim an unbroken cultural heritage to the old Taíno peoples,   
   others are revivalist communities who seek to incorporate Taíno culture into   
   their lives.   
      
   Various scholars have addressed the question of who were the native   
   inhabitants of the Caribbean islands to which Columbus voyaged in 1492. They   
   face difficulties, as European accounts cannot be read as objective evidence   
   of a native Caribbean social    
   reality. The people who inhabited most of the Greater Antilles when Europeans   
   arrived in the New World have been denominated as Taínos, a term coined by   
   Constantine Samuel Rafinesque in 1836. Taíno is not a universally accepted   
   denomination—it was    
   not the name this people called themselves originally, and there is still   
   uncertainty about their attributes and the boundaries of the territory they   
   occupied.   
      
   Two schools of thought have emerged regarding the origin of the indigenous   
   people of the Caribbean.   
      
   1. One group of scholars contends that the ancestors of the Taíno were Arawak   
   speakers who came from the center of the Amazon Basin. This is indicated by   
   linguistic, cultural and ceramic evidence. They migrated to the Orinoco valley   
   on the north coast.    
   From there they reached the Caribbean by way of what is now Venezuela into   
   Trinidad, migrating along the Lesser Antilles to Cuba and the Bahamian   
   archipelago. Evidence that supports the theory includes the tracing of the   
   ancestral cultures of this people    
   to the Orinoco Valley, and their languages to the Amazon Basin.   
      
   2. The alternate theory, known as the circum-Caribbean theory, contends that   
   the ancestors of the Taíno diffused from the Colombian Andes. Julian H.   
   Steward, who originated this concept, suggests a migration from the Andes to   
   the Caribbean and a    
   parallel migration into Central America and into the Guianas, Venezuela, and   
   the Amazon Basin of South America.   
      
   Taíno culture as documented is believed to have developed in the Caribbean.   
   The Taíno creation story says that they emerged from caves in a sacred   
   mountain on present-day Hispaniola. In Puerto Rico, 21st-century studies have   
   shown that a high    
   proportion of people have Amerindian mtDNA. Of the two major haplotypes found,   
   one does not exist in the Taíno ancestral group, so other Native American   
   people are also among the genetic ancestors.   
      
   DNA studies changed some of the traditional beliefs about pre-Columbian   
   indigenous history. According to National Geographic, "studies confirm that a   
   wave of pottery-making farmers—known as Ceramic Age people—set out in   
   canoes from the north-eastern    
   coast of South America starting some 2,500 years ago and island-hopped across   
   the Caribbean. They were not, however, the first colonizers. On many islands   
   they encountered a foraging people who arrived some 6,000 or 7,000 years   
   ago...The ceramicists, who    
   are related to today's Arawak-speaking peoples, supplanted the earlier   
   foraging inhabitants—presumably through disease or violence—as they   
   settled new islands."   
      
   Taíno society was divided into two classes: naborias (commoners) and   
   nitaínos (nobles). They were governed by male chiefs known as caciques, who   
   inherited their position through their mother's noble line. (This was a   
   matrilineal kinship system, with    
   social status passed through the female lines.) The nitaínos functioned as   
   sub-caciques in villages, overseeing the work of naborias. Caciques were   
   advised by priests/healers known as bohíques. Caciques enjoyed the privilege   
   of wearing golden pendants    
   called guanín, living in square bohíos, instead of the round ones of   
   ordinary villagers, and sitting on wooden stools to be above the guests they   
   received. Bohíques were extolled for their healing powers and ability to   
   speak with deities. They were    
   consulted and granted the Taíno permission to engage in important tasks.   
      
   Taíno practiced polygamy. Men, and sometimes women, might have two or three   
   spouses. Ramón Pané, a Catholic friar who traveled with Columbus on his   
   second voyage and was tasked with learning the indigenous people's language   
   and customs, wrote in the    
   16th century that caciques tended to have two or three wives and the principal   
   ones had as many as 10, 15, or 20.   
      
   Taíno spoke an Arawakan language and used an early form of proto-writing in   
   the form of petroglyph, as found in Taíno archeological sites in the West   
   Indies.   
      
   Some words they used, such as barbacoa ("barbecue"), hamaca ("hammock"), kanoa   
   ("canoe"), tabaco ("tobacco"), sabana (savanna) and juracán ("hurricane"),   
   have been incorporated into other languages.   
      
   For warfare, the men made wooden war clubs, which they called macanas. It was   
   about one inch thick and was similar to the coco macaque.   
      
   The Taínos decorated and applied war paint to their face to appear fierce   
   towards their enemies. They ingested substances at religious ceremonies and   
   invoked zemis.   
      
      
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